A brisk, engaging, but uneven time-travel tale.
A time-travel researcher seized by abductors from the future must be rescued in this SF sequel.
Los Alamos, New Mexico, is home to Project Enlightenment, a secret research facility devoted to time travel. In Going Back (2020), the first volume of Abel’s Defenders of Time Series, a project team led by Special Agent Lou Hessman, head of security, traveled back to 1919 to prevent a time displacement wave from changing history. The team returned with Claire Hill, a 24-year-old reporter who would have died of influenza in her own time. That was three months ago; now joining the team is Dr. Sam Weiss’ niece, Samantha Weiss. She has a doctorate in time-travel physics and, as the usually impassive Hessman can’t help noticing, is “a statuesque beauty.” But she’s barely arrived when Russian-speaking terrorists from the future kidnap her. A rescue mission that includes Hessman, Claire, and her fiance, professor Ben Stein, follows the time-displacement trail to London in 2120. Just as important as retrieving Samantha is understanding why she was nabbed—and why the terrorists allow her to return. The danger is far from over. In this ambitious installment, Abel provides a fast-paced adventure with entertaining action sequences. The plot ties in well to readers’ serious contemporary concerns with plastic waste, lightened by humor and romance. But the book isn’t very imaginative about the future, mainly just providing some technological window dressing for familiar contemporary elements, and is downright retro in some respects. Claire and Samantha, unlike the male characters, are described in terms of their attractiveness: “At five and a half feet tall and slender, with long black hair, a pearly white complexion, and blue eyes,” Claire “was a beauty in any century.” Samantha is Miss rather than Doctor, unlike her uncle. The uncredited monochrome illustrations depict dynamic cityscapes but human figures are amateurish.
A brisk, engaging, but uneven time-travel tale.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950906-92-5
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A derivative mess.
A half alien teenager sets out for the stars in search of his missing dad.
In what rapidly devolves into a jumble of well-worn science-fiction tropes and typecast settings glued together by adolescent behavior and muddy thinking, the story follows 16-year-old Sydney, who has been on the lam with his gun-toting default-White human mom for 10 years. Syd meets and agrees to join his alien uncle on a training voyage to planet Denza, where he can take classes at the local star fleet academy and find his father, who vanished on an exploratory voyage years before. Syd discovers that all humans become super strong and super tough when they leave Earth—but die when they return. Might his father have come upon a cure hidden among the relics of a…wait for it…mysterious race of vanished galactic overlords? In his typically unsubtle way, the pseudonymous Lore chucks discrimination into the mix too—being a “mutt,” as one hostile shipmate put it, Syd gets a decidedly mixed reception from the specist Denzans, and a fellow hybrid angrily informs him that she identifies as human. Before arbitrarily cutting off midway through, the climax collapses into a glutinous mass of revelations including the fate of Syd’s father and the nature of the aforementioned overlords. Oh, and there are space monsters and a magic ring.
A derivative mess. (Science fiction. 14-17)Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-284536-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Bound to be popular.
A suddenly trendy trope—conflict and romance between members of conquering and enslaved races—enlivened by fantasy elements loosely drawn from Arabic tradition (another trend!).
In an original, well-constructed fantasy world (barring some lazy naming), the Scholars have lived under Martial rule for 500 years, downtrodden and in many cases enslaved. Scholar Laia has spent a lifetime hiding her connection to the Resistance—her parents were its leaders—but when her grandparents are killed and her brother’s captured by Masks, the eerie, silver-faced elite soldiers of the Martial Empire, Laia must go undercover as a slave to the terrifying Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy, where Martials are trained for battle. Meanwhile, Elias, the Commandant’s not-at-all-beloved son, wants to run away from Blackcliff, until he is named an Aspirant for the throne by the mysterious red-eyed Augurs. Predictably, action, intrigue, bloodshed and some pounding pulses follow; there’s betrayal and a potential love triangle or two as well. Sometimes-lackluster prose and a slight overreliance on certain kinds of sexual violence as a threat only slightly diminish the appeal created by familiar (but not predictable) characters and a truly engaging if not fully fleshed-out fantasy world.
Bound to be popular. (Fantasy. 13 & up)Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59514-803-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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